Factors to Consider When Interviewing Candidates

It’s easy to assume that it only takes the right candidate to make a hiring process successful. However, interviews are a two-way process, which means that its success depends just as much on the interviewer than the applicant. While a business should focus on the applicants’ skills and experience prior to hiring them, it is also imperative to know how they interact well and respond to spontaneous situations—and this can be done when you ask the right questions.

To help you prepare in your search for the right employee, here are some important factors to keep in mind when conducting interviews.

Focus on the candidate.

Make sure to keep your focus on the candidate that you will be interviewing. For starters, thoroughly review their resume, and from there, you will be able to prepare more relevant questions rather than just spew out the standard ones.

A quick Google search can help you determine whether a specific candidate is the right fit for the position and the company’s culture. It can also help you to prepare in case the applicant has a certain skill set you are not familiar with, as well as to gauge your pay when an offer is handed out.

Mind your questions.

Asking applicants questions can be more challenging than when applicants are answering them. Aside from asking better interview questions, make sure that you are also asking the legal ones—those that focus on their strengths and weaknesses.

Yes, there are questions that could make your business a target for a lawsuit, such as those related to age, gender, race or ethnicity, religion, marital status, or disability.

While it is helpful to make an interview more like a conversation, delving into these personal ones can easily be a basis for potential job discrimination.

An important factor to consider is also one’s openness to drug testing. Some states may require companies to test their applicants for drugs and other substances prior to employment. A pre-employment urine drug test or THC test may be mentioned during the job interview to determine whether an applicant is amenable to it, reducing the company’s cost in the process.

Interview more; educate less.

Interviewers often make the mistake of bombarding their interviewees with information about the industry and the company. While educating potential employees is a standard in most job interviews, learning about your organization beforehand is the candidate’s homework; avoid doing it for them.

Instead of making this mistake, keep the job interview in the right path by asking open-ended questions that encourage them to talk about their past job performance and accomplishments. They may have rehearsed answers prepared even with open-ended questions, so don’t just settle for their responses. Instead, ask one or two questions as follow-up. This will more likely help you identify if they are a good fit for the job.

A job interview can make or break the success of recruitment, both for the applicant and the company. While candidates need to do their best to get hired, hiring managers also need to determine where potential lies and how to draw that potential out of the person.